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THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 19, 2017
of exploratory formal constraints. In
these works, blackness seems to be
depicted from the outside and there-
fore appears---as blackness is often
seen, by others---under the sign of
monstrosity. (A parallel example is
Kerry James Marshall's "A Portrait
of the Artist as a Shadow of His For-
mer Self " ( ), in which the artist
appears as a grinning, minstrelesque
mask.) Asked, in an e-mail, about
this earlier style, Yiadom-Boakye re-
plied, "It must have been a reaction
to alotofwhatwas saidto me.Hu-
mour and horror made sense because
that was how I felt. Often-times it re-
ally worked, other times it was hugely
dissatisfying. I think that's why I got
rid of so much of it as I went along.
Over time I realised I needed to think
less about the subject and more about
the painting. So I began to think very
seriously about colour, light and com-
position.The more I worked, the more
I came to realise that the power was
in the painting itself. My 'colour pol-
itics' took on a whole new meaning."
One of the most persistent misap-
prehensions that exists between
artists and viewers---and writers and
readers---concerns the relative weight
of content and form. Just as, in the
mind of a writer, individual novels will
tend, privately, to be considered not
"the one in which John kills Jane" or
"the one in which Kwame gets mar-
ried"but, rather, "the one with the semi-
colons" or "the one in which I realized
the possibility of commas," so that
which looks like figuration to a layman
like me ("Isn't that a beautiful fellow
with his owl?") is, for the artist, as much
about paint itself---its various possibil-
ities, moods and e ects, limits and free-
doms. In nonfigurative work, these tech-
nical preoccupations are perhaps easier
to spot, but, whether a human figure
can be discerned in the work or no, the
same battles with color, light, compo-
sition, and tone apply. One way to track
intellectual movements in the arts is
to follow the rise and fall of content
versus form (as Susan Sontag, in her
essay "On Style," pointed out not long
after Greenberg e ected his great sep-
aration of the abstract from the figu-
rative). Falsely separating the two---
and then insisting on the elevation of
one over the other---happens period-
ically, and often has the useful side
e ect of revitalizing the art practice of
the time, repressing what has become
overly familiar or championing the new
or the previously ignored.
"Sensation" marked Britain's paro-
chial, delayed response to thirty years of
complex aesthetic theory (mostly French
and American) that had privileged con-
tent (in the form of "the concept") over
form, but it also fatally and impurely
mixed these ideas with the careerism of
the Y.B.A.s themselves, who contributed
their own professional anxieties, dressed
up in contempt. Portraiture came to be
considered "content," and therefore a
subject that could be exhausted, despite
(or maybe because of ) its long, exalted
history. And, once it was deemed to be
exhausted, the consensus was that only
the most hubristic (or nostalgic) young
British artist would dare attempt it. What
is she trying to prove? Who does she think
"Mercy Over Matter" ( ). The paintings say little, explicitly, but you hear much.